Re: [asa] tipping point?

From Rich Blinne:

"On slide 9: December 2006 was the warmest December on record. January 2007
was the warmest January on record."

Data points of a month or two don't tell us a lot but this is a noteworthy
indicator.

By the way, I finally got a chance to listen to Charlie Rose's interview of
Michael Crichton on Feb. 19, 2007. They didn't really get into very much
technical data regarding State of Fear, only perceptions. I had the distinct
impression that Crichton has difficulty dealing with uncertainty. He
operates at both extremes--total certainty or don't know anything and has a
hard time understanding science that is anywhere in between. For example, he
stressed that scientists confess they don't know "for sure" about future
climate. He also polled a set of scientists whether they had "total
certainty" about climae projections and he thought it remarkable that only
9% said yes. I'm surprised even that many said yes. Most scientists will be
reluctant to say "for sure" or "total certainty" on anything but neither do
they mean we don't know anything. Yet that's what Crichton concludes.

He ends, interestingly, by saying that yes, there is global warming, yes,
humans are responsible for a significant amount, and yes, we need to reduce
CO2 emissions. (Good grief! So why the pointless tirades?) He does conclude
that global temperatures will rise 0.8 degrees C by the end of the century
instead of the larger IPCC estimates. Let's see. How does this work?
Scientists aren't certain and their models aren't conclusive so their
estimates can't be trusted. He, as a non-scientist, doesn't do any models,
doesn't do any scientific work, doesn't tell us his methodology, doesn't
know how to do statistics, and comes up with a very precise number which is
somehow more to be trusted than that of the scientists. I better go scratch
my head a little more on this one.

Randy

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Received on Sat, 3 Mar 2007 21:35:34 -0500